The amount of data stored by businesses, government agencies, academic institutions, and the like, continues to increase significantly. Large amounts of data may exceed the storage space available on a single computing device. Thus, data may be stored among many computing nodes in a distributed computing system. Requests for data from a distributed computing system may require a search among many different computing nodes to assemble a range of data that is responsive to a data request.
Often, a request for a range of data will require that the data range is searched and returned in an ordered fashion. For example, a salesperson may seek the top five customers from a set of data containing millions of customers. In another example, a census analyst may wish to search for commonalities among U.S. residents in the 25th percentile of income. The time and resources required to respond to such data requests may increase when data needs to be returned in an ordered fashion since the data may not be stored in the same order within the computing nodes of a distributed computing environment.